Julius Chambers, a Fighter for Civil Rights, Dies at 76

Julius L. Chambers, a civil rights lawyer who endured firebombings of his house, office and car in winning case after case against racial segregation, including one that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision allowing forced busing, died on Friday at his home in Charlotte, N.C. He was 76.

Geraldine Sumter, a law partner, confirmed the death, saying Mr. Chambers had had a heart attack in April and had been in declining health.

Mr. Chambers began championing civil rights well before he succeeded Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1984. Two decades earlier, he had left an internship at the fund to open a one-man law practice in Charlotte specializing in civil rights, its office in a cold-water walk-up. It grew to become North Carolina’s first integrated law firm.

In 1965, his second year in private practice, Mr. Chambers was working alongside the legal defense fund when he took on 35 school desegregation suits and 20 suits charging discrimination in public accommodations. One court victory that year barred the Shrine Bowl of the Carolinas, a charity football game, from excluding black players.

Another, far-reaching 1965 case was filed on behalf of a 6-year-old, James Swann, and nine other families alleging that school district policies had put black students in segregated schools. Mr. Chambers and the legal defense fund persuaded a federal judge, James B. McMillan, to order busing to promote integration of public schools.

The case went to the Supreme Court, and in 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the justices upheld the judge’s ruling, granting federal courts the power to order busing to force racial integration. The ruling had the effect of ending government-sanctioned segregation in Southern schools.

In 2002, the Supreme Court allowed Charlotte, like many other cities, to end busing as a means to achieve integration, saying the goal had been achieved. Mr. Chambers opposed the ruling, arguing that blacks continued to receive an inferior education in racially imbalanced schools.

Mr. Chambers took on job discrimination in a suit that also found its way to the Supreme Court. In the case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the court ruled in 1971 that some of Duke’s hiring requirements, like a high school education or a certain I.Q. level, were irrelevant to some jobs and had the effect of excluding qualified black workers. It said employers must justify any rule that has disproportionate effects on minorities by proving that the rule is necessary for business reasons.

Mr. Chambers’s victories came with a cost. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Swann, his offices were firebombed. After his successes in 1965, his car was firebombed and two bombs exploded in his home.

His response was defiant; he said he would “keep fighting.” It was also measured. “We must accept this type of practice,” he said, “from those less in control of their faculties.”

Julius LeVonne Chambers was born on Oct. 6, 1936, in Mount Gilead, N.C., where his father, William, owned a garage and general store. As the third of four children, Julius was looking forward to following his two older siblings to the Laurinburg Institute, a historically black preparatory school. But his father told him that there would be no money for his tuition because a white customer had refused to pay for repairs to a truck. His father had paid for the parts out of his own pocket.

The elder Mr. Chambers sought the help of white lawyers in town, but all refused to take the case. In that moment, Julius Chambers said, he decided on a legal career.

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Julius L. Chambers in 1984.CreditDon Hogan Charles/The New York Times

Mr. Chambers graduated from high school in May 1954, the month the Supreme Court ordered an end to school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. He went to North Carolina College, a historically black institution now known as North Carolina Central University, where he was student body president and graduated summa cum laude.

He earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which had only just begun admitting blacks, reluctantly. He was elected editor in chief of The North Carolina Law Review.

He also graduated first in his law school class but was barred from attending its end-of-year banquet at the segregated Chapel Hill Country Club.

Mr. Chambers headed north, becoming a teaching associate at Columbia Law School, where he earned a master’s of law degree. While there, Thurgood Marshall, who would become the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice, selected him as one of two interns to be trained by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and then sent him South to take on civil rights cases. The other intern was Marian Wright Edelman, who is now president of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Mr. Chambers’s private practice in Charlotte grew to 11 members by 1972, 5 of whom were white. Forty percent of their cases involved civil rights.

After assuming leadership of the legal defense fund in 1984, Mr. Chambers expanded its mission to include economic issues like high unemployment and inferior municipal services in inner cities as outgrowths of racial discrimination. He called it the Poverty Justice program.

He had continued to win cases before the Supreme Court. In one, in 1975, the court endorsed his argument that an employee who proves discrimination is entitled to back pay. In another case, in 1986, concerning voting rights, the court ruled that intent is not necessary to establish a violation of the voting rights of racial minorities.

One of Mr. Chambers’s trickier cases involved a longstanding disagreement with the N.A.A.C.P. over the legal defense fund’s name. The fund began as the N.A.A.C.P.’s legal arm but was spun off in 1939. In 1957, Mr. Marshall made it independent of the N.A.A.C.P.

The N.A.A.C.P. created its own legal department and in 1982 sued the fund for trademark infringement, arguing that sharing the name could confuse potential donors. But in 1985, a federal appeals court permitted the fund to keep its name.

Mr. Chambers became president of North Carolina Central University, his alma mater, in 1993. He returned to his law practice in Charlotte in 2001.

Mr. Chambers’s wife, the former Vivian Giles, died last year. He is survived by his son, Derrick; his daughter, Judy Chambers; and three grandchildren.

In a reminiscence he wrote after Mr. Chambers’s death, John Charles Boger, dean of the University of North Carolina law school, recalled when, as a young lawyer at the legal defense fund, he gathered with Mr. Chambers and with other lawyers at his office before going to lunch. They noticed that an older black woman, humbly dressed, had come in and was sitting quietly.

Mr. Chambers asked why she had come. She hesitated, then said that her son had special needs and that he had been locked in a supply cabinet at school without justification. She said the school’s officials seemed indifferent.

“Come to lunch with us,” Mr. Chambers said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Julius Chambers, 76, Dies; A Fighter for Civil Rights. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe